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A night at the opera: That Bastard Puccini! (Park Theatre)

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It’s hard to imagine that it’s only been 130 years since Puccini first premiered La Boheme. Nowadays, it’s a revered classic, and guaranteed to be on any opera company's annual programme if it needs to stay afloat. It’s a crowd pleaser with its melodrama of poor, impoverished artists loving, starving and dying in Paris. But Puccini’s La Boheme had a less auspicious beginning, with one of his contemporaries accusing him of stealing his idea and being poorly received on its first outing. And that’s at the heart of That Bastard Puccini! Currently playing at Park Theatre , writer James Inverne uses the friendship and rivalry between the two composers, Puccini and Ruggero Leoncavallo, to weave a comic tale of creative frustration with an awful lot of facts and tidbits about the opera scene at the time. It’s part comedy, part music appreciation.  It opens with Leoncavallo (Alasdair Buchan) at home with his wife Berthe (Lisa-Anne Wood), cursing about Puccini’s latest work, which is drawn ...
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Enablers: Anomaly @ORLtheatre

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There’s an awful lot of enabling going on in Anomaly. Liv Warden’s slick new play about three sisters whose father has been arrested for GBH after attacking their mother. He’s a Harvey Weinstein-like character who is the head of a big film studio. There’s money and film careers at stake. But not so much character development and so it’s a bit hard to understand any of them. It’s currently playing at the Old Red Lion Theatre . Everyone’s turned a blind eye to his past indiscretions and violent outbursts as there’s something in it for them. There’s Piper (Natasha Conley) the cold executive who is going to run the studio one day. If the other investors don’t pull the plug on the whole business following the scandal. Then there’s Penny (Katherine Samuelson) with the dazzling smile and breasts about to land a great film role thanks to her father’s connections.   But there’s a third sister, Polly (Alice Handoll). Out of rehab and slightly out of her mind. She’s meant to be the conscience...
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